One at a time. I think I'll start on my IM/IRC framework. Pidgin sucks on Windows, right? :) I'm hoping to provide the same functionality but with .NET and WPF. So, Banter is born. I'll be focusing on AIM and IRC at first, since they're of the most use to me. Banter will be composed of two things, the actual visible IM application and the class library that powers it. I plan to wrap OscarLib until I get around to providing protocol plugins. Yes I know the authors of OscarLib has a WPF client for it, but I think I have a different philosophy. This project isn't related to the GNOME project's Banter.

However, I'm hitting a bug in WPF. I was prototyping a UI and came across this weird bug I cannot reproduce in software rendering. Maybe it's my graphics driver? See the image attached to this post. This isn't limited to menus, I see black areas around other WPF elements like when using Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. Another thing that bothered me was the performance and the drawing. Again, maybe it's my drivers. Windows Vista introduced a new Window Manager, the Desktop Window Manager. Moving around windows doesn't cause tearing, but if I resize a window, WPF is slow to re-render things. I tested this on native Windows applications like Explorer. Again, I see the same problem, but not as pronounced as in WPF. Mac OS X doesn't have this problem with its composting window manager, resizes are smooth and instantaneous.

This is disappointing. Any ideas?